Silliker australia p&l travers biography
In , her father died. The seven-year-old Travers, along with her two younger sisters, went to live with her Aunt Christina in New South Wales , who later became the subject of her book Aunt Sass She first attended a local school and then a boarding school where she became an enthusiastic actress and playwright. Travers was offered a role on the Sydney stage at the age of ten but her mother forbade it.
From earliest childhood, she had been writing stories, and directing and acting in her own plays. At the age of 16, possibly dissatisfied with home and school life where she was expected to shoulder burdens beyond her years, she joined a traveling company of dancers and actors, and soon began to work as a freelance writer of journalism and poetry.
Silliker australia p l
Saving her money from these assignments, she was able to immigrate to England in , where she continued to sell work to magazines and newspapers. Early poems describe her search for love. In "The Plane Tree" , she compares the unhappy ending of a love-affair to the falling of summer foliage which leaves nature starkly revealed:. In Ireland, where she went in search of her father's relatives, she met the poet A.
George William Russell , who accepted her poetry for publication in his journal The Irish Statesman , introduced her to Indian mythology, and would take a keen interest in the ancestry of her fictional creation Mary Poppins. She nursed Russell in his last illness and was present at his death in Dublin in Biographer Patricia Demers thinks that much of her subsequent work was a playing out of themes introduced to her, or encouraged, by him during their close friendship.
Russell also introduced her to William Butler Yeats , by then the grand old man of Irish literature, who encouraged her literary ambitions and shared a similar enthusiasm for fairy tales, legends, and magic. On a visit to see him, she gathered branches from rowan trees on the Isle of Innisfree, subject of one of his most famous poems.
Travers wrote Mary Poppins in an ancient thatched Sussex cottage, while recovering from an illness, and published it in , but the character had been familiar to her since childhood.
She had told her younger sister Mary Poppins stories when they were both children, and had written "M. Poppins" inside the cover of one of her own books when she was seven. The Banks family's nursemaid Mary Poppins is a magical being with a large fund of common sense, much less sentimental than her later personification in the movie, and imperious in her demands on the children she cares for.
Having the outward appearance of an old-fashioned nanny, tall and thin, vain and prim, she flies through the air with the help of a parrot-headed umbrella, slides up the banisters, can whisk her charges around the world, or back in time, and resents receiving any instructions from her ostensible employers. She takes the children to the zoo one evening where they are lectured by a wise old snake, the Hamadryad.
Silliker australia p&l travers biography
Mary Poppins refuses to explain her conduct or the nature of her magic. And she is always her own boss, coming or going as she pleases. Mary Poppins , with illustrations by Mary Shepard , was an instant success—Travers claimed that she did not try to write for children, but just assumed that they would understand what she had written.
Much later, in she rewrote a section of the original book which included black children speaking in dialect, because black parents groups had protested it as racist and urged its removal from libraries and schools in San. Travers was annoyed at having to submit to this pressure, arguing that children of all races enjoyed the book it was already translated into 25 languages.
During the s, Travers wrote regularly for a new magazine, the New English Weekly , and remained a faithful contributor until it folded in Eliot was one of its editorial advisors and she reviewed enthusiastically the first performances of several of his plays, including Murder in the Cathedral. She was a regular drama reviewer, willing to criticize the leading actors and directors of the era in London and Stratford and often expressing the opinion that British theater needed a transfusion of new blood.
Theater, which she knew from both sides of the footlights, seemed to her a rich and expressive art. We know ourselves not merely by inward but also by outward looking and the theater, of all the secondary arts, provides the greatest natural arena for the clash or contact of self with other. Travers also wrote book reviews and travel pieces and in made a guided tour of the Soviet Union , which she commemorated in her second book Moscow Excursion She had no explicit political views to vindicate, unlike many literary pilgrims to the early Soviet Union , but she found the endless trumpeting of industrial and agricultural achievements rather hard to bear and much preferred seeing a Russian version of Hamlet in a Moscow theater.
Through Camillus, Travers had three grandchildren. She died in London on 23 April at the age of In , a crater on the planet Mercury was named in her honour. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item.
Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist — Early life [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. In England [ edit ]. Blue plaque at the address. Mary Poppins [ edit ]. Disney version [ edit ]. Main article: Mary Poppins film. Later films [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Travers crater [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Books [ edit ]. Collections [ edit ].
Non-fiction [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Citations [ edit ]. Travers British author ". The Daily Telegraph telegraph. Archived from the original on Retrieved Travers, Pamela Lyndon Travers]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed. Oxford University Press.
Travers, P.L. (1906–1996) - Encyclopedia.com: P L (Pamela Lyndon) Travers, the creator of the well - known nanny Mary Poppins, was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland on 9 August While the name Travers is a family name which she adopted, there is no explanation for her other adopted name, Pamela, which she rarely uses preferring to be known as P L.
Subscription or UK public library membership required. Monument Australia. It was during this time that she adopted the stage name Pamela Lyndon Travers - taking her beloved father's first name as her surname and using a popular name of the time as her first name. Travers' love of the written word soon reasserted itself and she began writing articles for newspapers and magazines.
Moving to London in to pursue her writing career, she met famous poets and writers like George William Russell and William Butler Yeats and joined their literary circle. Travers' most famous creation, Mary Poppins, first appeared in a story published in the Christchurch Sun in , before taking centre stage in when her first book of stories was published and Travers' fame was secured.
Travers would go on to create eight distinct volumes of Mary Poppins magic in a publishing phenomenon spanning 55 years. The Disney film Mary Poppins made the notoriously private and prickly Travers immensely wealthy, but also unhappy. Her father, Travers Goff, was an unsuccessful bank manager and heavy drinker who died when she was 7.
Called Lyndon as a child, Travers moved with her mother and sisters to New South Wales after her father's death, where they were supported by a great aunt the inspiration for her book Aunt Sass. Travers had a rich fantasy life and loved fairy tales and animals, often calling herself a hen. Her precocious reading led her to undertake The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , and her writing talents emerged during her teens, when she began publishing poems in Australian periodicals.
Adopting the stage name Pamela popular at the time Lyndon Travers, she gained a modest reputation as a dancer and Shakespearean actress. Her wealthy relatives, however, did not approve; feeling that Australians lacked humor and lyricism, she left for London, England, to seek the literary life. Having begun her journalism career in Australia, Travers was able to parlay her voyage into travel stories for homeland papers.
Once in England, she began publishing articles in various papers, including poems that she had submitted to The Irish Statesman. Travers had a love of Irish mythology, perhaps stemming from her father's stories when she was a child, so the friendship had a special significance.